SUMMER DAYS DRIFTED AWAY
Yo, party poopers!
So since it’s the end of August, I’m declaring “summer” officially over. Back in June I made a list of the crap I wanted to accomplish over the summer, so let’s recap and see just how big of a failure I was:
- “Walk until my toes fall off.” Haha. Ha. Pretty close, let me tell ya…
- “Clean the condo. My responsibilities are the bathroom and kitchen, which get the most visibly gross the fastest.” I actually did this! Maybe once, though. Now that my leg is a wounded animal, I’m afraid to bend it too much. Bending is a pretty big requirement for cleaning the bathroom, ‘cause I get all down and dirty and scrub every inch of the bathtub. I get it filthy with my gross walking feet; it’s only right that I clean it.
- “Consolidate my pasta.” DID IT! Now there’s only like 13 boxes in the cabinet instead of 20+.
- “Clean the little storage room in the back. There’s a lot of boxes back there. And cat litter dust. Time to sweep where no man has swept before!” DONE! LOTS of cat litter dust.
- “Clean my side of the closet. There’s a lot of boxes in there. Mostly shoe boxes full of dead Kinvaras.” DONE! I kept the Kinvaras, though. Stuck ‘em in a giant bag. I’m not a hoarder, no siree.
- “Draw more.” HA.
- “Organize my bookmarks.” DONE!
- “Read this amazing biography of this amazing human being yet again, because it’s getting to be that time of the year.” Didn’t do this one ‘cause Nate was busy reading it.
- “Rewrite my old calculus notes into one giant notebook combining calc I, calc II, and calc III.” Nope.
- “Do my 50-mile walk. It’s time.” DONE! This is the one I’m most proud of.
- “Organize the crap on my computer.” Mostly done, yes.
- “POST THESE BLOGS OMFG” I did the first round! They’re posted through the beginning of July, which is a pretty big deal considering how many that needed posting back in June.
Not too bad!
lasjfldjsfa
Yesterday was my post about Skagway and thus I didn’t get to post my super awesome news, so here it is today instead:
AAAAAAAAAAA I GET TO TEACH IN THE FALL AAAAAAAJLFJAD;LFKJADF
YAY!!!!!
Sorry. That’s really good news.
Skag the Wag
So we did the Skagway train ride today, ‘cause that’s the excursion I always do with my dad when we’re in Skagway. It was awesome as always. Pictures!
Also, it really makes me happy to see people being nice to each other. The stairs to exit the train are relatively steep. After we had exited out of our own car, we passed this one older dude trying to get down the steep stairs from another car. There were like five people—probably all complete strangers—helping him out, making sure he made it to the ground safely.
That kind of stuff really makes me happy.
Also, CATERPILLAR!
Juneau
We’s in Juneau today! Rather than do any sort of excursions, we decided to just get out and walk for a bit, which was nice.
My leg is still being twingy, but walking outside is much easier than trying to walk on the treadmill while the ship is moving.
(And is also a lot more enjoyable than 4 hours on a treadmill).
Pics!
I’m not good at pictures, sorry.
Edit: holy hell, the hot dogs on this ship are FANTASTIC.
Seasickness? Noooooooooo
Today was an “at sea” day on the ship, and GUESS WHO GOT SEASICK?
(hint: it wasn’t Nate)
I’ve done this cruise four freaking times before and have never gotten seasick, but the ship was rolling on the waves just right this afternoon to cause my brain to freak out and made me dry heave over the toilet multiple times.
Party time.
But things got better in the early evening. Nate and I ordered cheese and crackers for dinner and they were the best cheese and crackers ever.
Then we played war with two decks of cards. Nate happened to get six aces by the deal, so I was pretty much screwed, but I had the magic of the ace of spades (who I named JesAce…like “Jesus” but with “ace” instead of “us” because I’m made of blasphemy) and was able to stay alive until we got bored of playing.
I hope this sickness doesn’t return though, ‘cause gross.
Off to Alaska!
It’s time for our Alaska cruise! This is the fourth (I think?) time I’ve done this cruise, but it’s different every time and is really enjoyable.
Some pics from our departure from Seattle:
WOO!
SIGGEDY
Ha, awesome. I may have posted this before…? I don’t know.
Ouches
My teeth are a fucking disaster zone. They’re super sensitive to cold (and heat, but less so than cold) and my gums always hurt. They also bleed like hell every time I brush my teeth. Like…lots of blood.
This is entirely my own fault; I used to have really good teeth. I fucked ‘em up. I’ll explain how in a later blog (assuming I get the courage to post it), but yeah.
I’m screwed.
Baseball Stat Party Fun Time
A fun project!
At the end of the regular baseball season, you can see how many wins each team got out of the total number of games they played, and then rank the teams by their performance (who had the most wins, the second most wins, etc.).
What I want to do is see how this “real” data correlates with how many wins each team would get if they scored their average number of runs per game in every single game they played. For example, if the Mariners score an average of 4.74 runs per game, how many of their games would they have won by scoring 4.74 runs in each of those games?
The process:
- Record each team’s average runs per game (I’ll call this “RPG”) (from here)
- Sort teams from highest to lowest RPG
Now, if a team A has a higher RPG than team B, that would mean that A would win every game they play against B. So the next step was to make a grid like this and fill in the number of times each pair of teams played each other.
Boston has a higher RPG than the Rockies (5.42 and 5.22, respectively). So that means Boston would score 5.42 runs and the Mariners would score 5.22 runs in every game they played against each other. So of the 7 games played where these two teams faced each other, that would mean that Boston would win all of them.
I used this logic for all pairings (numbers of games per pair was obtained from here), then summed across the rows to get the “predicted” number of wins based on RPG alone.
How do they compare for the 2016 season?
Boston (highest RPG) would win every game they played; The Phillies (lowest RPG) and the Athletics (bad luck) would lose every game they played. Bummer.
Correlation of RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.640
Correlation of team rankings based on RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.683
Interesting!
TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN
Heeeeeeeey, so just like every other human being in North America today, let’s obsess about the eclipse!
I can’t report too much. Calgary was at like 80% coverage, but the sun being the sun, you couldn’t really tell too much. It got dim, but it certainly didn’t get dark.
I did risk the life of my phone camera, though, to bring you this:
There’s that 80%!
The good news for Calgary? The total solar eclipse on August 22, 2044, will pass right through Alberta. Assuming it’s not cloudy (and we’re still living in the same place), Nate and I will have a balcony view of it. Pretty snazzy!
Arrrrrrrrrrrrt, matey!
I call it “Total Eclipse of the Heart” because the eclipse is tomorrow and I’m super imaginative and clever like that.
SpongeCake SquarePan
These guys have made some action re-makes of SpongeBob SquarePants episodes.
They’re fantastic. Example:
The guy who plays SpongeBob does a freakishly good “panicked SpongeBob cry” (2:31).
Hola
So I totally forgot to mention this when I found it a month or so ago as I was cleaning out the crap in my closet, but I found a story I wrote way back in 4th grade.
It’s a bag of trash and there’s 52 pages of it, but I’mma type it up all pretty and post it for you as a blog at some point down the road, ‘cause that’s what my blog is for: humiliating myself.
Hoorah!
MOVE, TREE, GET IN THE HOLE
I had no idea there was a giant Sequoia in Boise.
Of the like 400 things I would like to study if I ever went back to school (again), one of the top options would be trees. Old, giant trees. I love these massive beings.
Wholly Balls
The following is an accurate depiction of me trying to suppress all my stupid emotions and store them away in a neat little box so that I don’t annoy anyone with my nonsense.
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH
My speed has freaking tanked due to whatever I did to my knee.
It’s really, really frustrating.
Sorry, too frustrated to blog.
UGUGUHGGHFHFDKHGDFKLGJFDGJDFKL
I could only do 14 miles today. I might have been able to do 15, but I didn’t want to push things too much.
It all still hurts, but if I walk really slowly and kinda wonky, I can start collecting miles.
I’m so slow, though. 3.86 MPH versus 4.90 MPH at the beginning of last week.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.
Blogging: A Dying Art
You know what I’ve noticed lately? Not a lot of people blog anymore. At least, not a lot of people I know.
I remember when MySpace was a thing. Everyone had a blog on MySpace. But since MySpace tanked, most of these people no longer have a blog (that I know of).
This makes me super sad. If there’s anything I love as much as blogging, it’s reading other peoples’ blogs…the more random the blog, the better. I like reading snippets of others’ lives.
Anyway. Just an observation. Because of this stupid injury, I feel like a bird who had its wings sawed off, so I’m in a brooding mood.
What Makes a 5-Star a 5-Star?
So because I MURDERED MY LEG APPARENTLY, I’m taking a few days off from walking.
Which blows. I hate it.
BUT it’s given me a chance to try to organize my music in a bit more of a coherent manner in preparation for the big end of my “Decade of Music” project in a few years. Doing so got me thinking about my 5-star songs and what, exactly, makes a song qualified to be a 5-star.
For y’all that aren’t aware, I use iTunes for my music. iTunes gives you the option of rating your songs as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 stars. In my ranking system, the “5-star club” is very exclusive; I’ve made it a rule that I can only have 50 songs rated 5 stars at a time. And considering I’ve got like 4,000 songs total, that’s not very many.
But how do I choose what gets 5 stars versus 4 stars? For example, what makes WALK THE MOON’s Avalanche only get 4 stars but the same group’s Tightrope get an enthusiastic 5 stars?
It’s hard to define the distinction, but there is one. 5-star songs are an experience. They make me instantly feel excited when I hear them. Quite often, if I’m out walking in the winter and a 5-star song comes on over my headphones, I will say something like “I love this song!” out loud. 4-star songs don’t give that reaction. 4-star songs are those that I can listen to on repeat, but do so “mindlessly”—that is, without really paying attention to the songs themselves and just liking them for the background noise. With 5-stars, I will deliberately re-start them if I don’t feel like I’m listening to them closely enough.
The 5-stars do change; every once and a while a song will just naturally be dropped from the list because it no longer provides that visceral “OH HELL YES I LOVE THIS FREAKING SONG” reaction. Other times I’ll find a new song that is amazing and 5-star-worthy and will have to reconsider my current 5-star list in order to kick an older song down to 4 stars.
Anyway. There is a distinction, but it’s very feelings-based and weird. Which I guess is everyone’s reaction to music and the reasoning behind their favorite songs.
I used to walk 30 miles a day…but then I took an arrow to the knee
Or rather, I took an “I don’t know what the hell I did, it just started randomly hurting” to the knee and now I can’t walk for shit.
Seriously. I was out walking this morning, planning just to do 20 miles because we were going to drive up to Coeur d’Alene this afternoon, and around mile 10 my right knee kind of started to twinge. Every muscle/joint/tendon/ligament/fiber in my lower body has hurt at some point on these long walks, so I kept going. By mile 12, it hurt so badly I was actually crying. Managed to hobble 4 more miles back into town and called my mom to pick me up at Winco.
I have no idea what I did, but it hurts to walk and everything is terrible. And I can’t go to a doctor or Quick Care or anything ‘cause I don’t have insurance in the States anymore.
Edit 1: alright, so it doesn’t actually seem like I hurt my knee. It’s seeming more like it’s a quad muscle thing or a connective tissue thing, though the symptoms I have aren’t really a great match to anything I can find on the internet. Maybe a quad strain or sprain? Maybe a tear? Maybe I screwed up the connective tissue?
I’ll take a day or so off. Maybe two. Then I’ll try a walk again.
UGH.
Edit 2: man, this turned into a thing.
Heyyyyyyyyy I got new headphones!
They’re Bose SoundLink On-Ear Bluetooth headphones and they’re super nice. They’re not noise-cancelling, but they still do a pretty good job of blocking out other sounds.
They also have, like other Bose headphones I’ve tried, really good bass. It’s not overwhelming, but it’s definitely there and you can definitely feel it in certain songs.
I really dig these. If you’re looking for headphones and are cool with a pair that are about $200, give these a try!
My heart, she pounds
More kilogram news, people! It looks like our favorite non-conforming SI base unit is finally going to join the popular crowd and get defined by a physical constant rather than a physical object. It sounds like discussions are going to take place this year and a formal vote will take place next year.
Do you know how cool that is? We could possibly see a re-definition of the kilogram. A more precise definition.
That is seriously huge.
Eigenblogger 